


full moons over desert nights

by standingappa



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, First Kiss, Getting Together, Historical, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:42:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25569196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standingappa/pseuds/standingappa
Summary: These are the stuttering, rocky hills outside Jerusalem as Yusuf al-Kaysani knew them, when Nicky was Nicolò di Genova and they had only just begun to dream.A love letter, written in memories.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 23
Kudos: 266





	full moons over desert nights

The moon is full, hanging fat and low in the sky like a ripe fruit. Here in the desert, far from the city, it is the brightest thing the eye can see. Joe has been to a thousand places like this. He knew the dry heat of high noon and the listless chill of night before he even knew himself.

They all have nights like these, trapped within their own heads as the stars crest and fall overhead and the sky begins to turn.

They each have their way—Booker and his bottle, Nicky and his menial tasks to quell his busy hands and murmuring to Joe quietly in dead languages in the dark, Quynh mindlessly fingering the string of her beloved bow and running her calloused fingertips through the fletchings of her arrows.

Andy is drowning in time, has lost the need to make use of it. But once, long ago, before the world had changed so drastically from the one they had been born into, Joe remembered her doting on their horses. Polishing their saddles, brushing dirt and grass from their manes and tails, grooming their coats until they shone like metal.

Joe has his sketchbook.

A few months have passed since Andy left them. In the context of their lives, months mean little to them—Joe and Nicky are getting to the age where they have started differentiating by the century—but time has seemed to slow without Andy’s sharp blue eyes.

Since Quynh sank beneath the sea, they had all watched Andy desperately grasping at the minutes slipping through her fingers like rainwater. It had slowed for a while, when she loved Achilles, on that little farm in Australia. But he was a flower blooming in spring, gone with the breeze. Quynh lost, Lykon dead—nothing remained of the time when Andy was young and invulnerable and free. She had been left behind with her sorrow, those she loved a distant light through a bank of fog.

It is this thought, and this thought alone that keeps Joe awake at night in a way that Nicky cannot soothe away with his words or his smiles or with the gentle touch of his hands. His fear is a beast cowering in a cavern in his chest, threatening to swallow him whole. Joe cannot set it loose in Nicky.

Thirty-three years he lived before he met Nicky, but what should have been his formative years have smooth themselves over in his memory like ripples in a pond. Nothing that mattered to him then mean anything to him anymore. They had come into immortality together. They had taken the first of each other’s deaths. Joe cannot imagine going into death without him.

He sees his future in Andy and Booker—or the even more terrible thought, Nicky’s future. The hollowness with which they view the passage of time, the ache with which they remember being in love. For them, all that remained of its joy was nothing more than the last taste of honey on their back of their tongue, and the vague feeling that there had once been something more. Something they had lived for.

What little they know about themselves does nothing to settle his thoughts. Quynh was alive when Booker died for the first time, a hundred years after she had been cast into the sea, the water squeezing out life after life. Andy was a child at the dawn of the West, with more time than the mind could fathom. But Lykon had been given less than a millennium before he died his final death; Nicky and Joe were older than he had lived to be.

Each time a knife passes through the chambers of Nicky’s heart or a bullet blows its way through his skull, there is the moment when his heart stops, all feeling in the world drops away but his fingers on Nicky’s skin, hoping the warmth will return to his kind face, all sight but the blue of Nicky’s eyes, hoping for a flicker of life to return.

That is the face of the beast. Nicky’s eyes, dead in the dark. Nicky’s eyes, frozen to ice as he kneels as Joe’s grave.

Once, probably with too much alcohol in her veins, Andy told them of the fall of Troy—not as Homer wrote it, with his gods and heroes, but as she lived it.

_I was Andromache, daughter of Eëtion of Thebes, wife of Hector._

In that time, wives and their women prepared bodies for the funeral. Hector had come to her, face painted shades of red and purple, skin shredded like tissue, wounds clogged with dirt and filth. She had seen this coming, when he had returned to the city with the armour of Achilles—the mythic Achilles, the one for which hers would eventually be named—and the blood of Patroclus on his spear.

 _Men are cruel and terrible in their grief,_ she said. They had all heard stories of Achilles, not god-born as Homer claimed, by still by far the best warrior of the Greeks. They all knew what Patroclus was to him.

 _Achilles will slay you for this,_ she had warned him. _Not even I can stop him._

It had been a spear to the throat that killed Hector. The wounds littering his body came when Achilles hitched to him to the back of his chariot, dragging his corpse like a child dragging a toy along.

This is how Joe imagines what his grief would be.

For Nicky, the world would freeze over, all the music and poetry and colour gone with Joe’s passing. He would descend upon those he was pointed towards as swift and chilling as the winter. But Joe would burn the world with the fire that had once burned for Nicky, drawing blood with his hands and teeth until his split knuckles refused to heal.

———

Joe draws by the light of the moon. Paper and pencil are his favoured medium, he handles them such fluidity that the drawing seems to command his hand. The picture he sketches is one he has drawn a hundred times. It is what he draws when he wishes to remember.

The deserts of the American southwest are vivid and dramatic, flat land and sharp cliffs carved by rivers thousands of years older than even them. The horizon he sketches in loose, broad strokes is crammed with long, sloping hills; land that has refused to settle. The moon was full that night, too, but the stars walked different paths across the sky.

These are the stuttering, rocky hills outside Jerusalem as Yusuf al-Kaysani knew them, when Nicky was Nicolò di Genova and they had only just begun to dream. The Holy City fell in the middle of the summer, beneath the glare of a sun so hot it seemed to live in his skin. Only at night was the arid desert bearable, and at night they travelled into the unknown on war horses stained with the remnants of battle. He remembers it with certainty and clarity, a thing most memories do not have.

For all of them, there are memories that do not fade. For the others, it is the trauma, the grief and the pain, that brands them onto their souls.

Booker’s sons on their deathbeds, pleading with their miraculous father who has never aged, who escaped the hand to share the secrets of living as time withered their lives away.

Blood dripping from Andy’s wrists as she fights to claw herself free from her chains as Quynh is condemned to drown for the rest of her thousands of lives. Lykon’s blood, coating her calloused fingertips like slick oil as his final life fades away. Her Achilles, hair white and snow and face carved with age, begging her to leave.

Life has been kinder to Joe. He has no memories like these and prays he never will.

———

Nicky’s face shining like a silver dollar, his mouth hanging slightly agape, pale eyes watching him. Beyond, the walls of Jerusalem have begun to crack like a chick pipping at its egg. It is the very thing Nicky has travelled all these miles to witness, the thing Joe has killed to prevent. And yet, neither of them care—nothing matters to them but the other.

This is the memory that will stay with Joe for all his life, his oldest and dearest, the point at which his life began.

———

The year is 1099. It is the seventeenth of June; Jerusalem has been under siege for ten days. The Genoese fleet has just arrived. It is late in the day, and the flat fields north of the Holy City are alive with chaos.

The flag of Genoa bears Saint George’s Cross, a red cross on a white field. It is on their banners, on their shields, on the tunics they wear over their chainmail armour, but the red is spilling beyond its cross as soldier after soldier is felled by Yusuf’s blade. He is not a warrior by trade, but he is one of the best of the newly-minted soldiers called to the city’s defense.

Good as he was, Yusuf did not see the spear coming. Its metal tip was cold against his throat, cold as it sank through the skin of his neck and through his throat so deep it hit bone. If he had not bled out, he would have died as he suffocated on the thick blood filling his lungs. It was a quick death. A clean death.

He is at death’s door before he even registers the gash in his throat. One last thing swims across his field of vision. A horse—true white, with hair like snow and a nose pink as a baby’s cheek.

The world returns to him in a smothering cacophony—hooves against stone, the clashing of blades, the last sounds of dying men. He lays still on the ground, just feeling the withering sun on his back and the ground thundering with violence.

Yusuf watches as a Crusader charges at a man he knew—his name is lost to Yusuf now, but he remembers how young he was to be fighting, even for that time. Thrice, their swords clash, but Yusuf cannot hear them sing. What Yusuf does hear is the cry that leaps from his throat as he is impaled on the Crusader’s blade.

Yusuf forces himself from the ground, coughing cool blood from his throat. Narrowing his eyes against the sun, he pushes himself to his feet, blood-stained rocks digging into his palms.

He spots the white horse almost at once and the man who sits firmly upon it. He is hugging his shield close and bringing the point of his spear down with the righteous conviction all men brought into this war of faiths.

The front of Yusuf’s clothes are soaked in blood, the marking of a man soon to be dead, not worth the effort. Soldiers on both sides pay him no mind as he pulled a spear from a dead soldier’s hand and began to fight anew.

That night, his peers assume the wine-red stain on his clothes is from someone he has slain. He does not correct them, the truth sticking in his throat when he tries to speak.

When he convinces his mind to settle enough to fall into a fitful sleep, Yusuf dreams of Andy and Quynh. The details are lost, blurred with his memories of them, but he can guess at what he saw—fighting, dying, laughing at a joke told in a language he did not understand.

The man’s white horse is there again the next day, the brightest thing on the battlefield. When the man sees Yusuf, he sees the recognition and confusion flash in his eyes that clearly say, _you should be dead._ He is right, but Yusuf does not want to linger on the thought.

In the moment of the man’s confusion, Yusuf swings his sword, driving it into the soft flesh of his belly and throws the man from his horse. The man is not dead when he hits the ground, but when the back hoof of Yusuf’s horse catches on his body, crushing ribs and organs beneath its iron shoe. He dies, his blood spilling in a dark pool around him.

Or so he thought, because the next morning, there he is on the battlefield again, red cross emblazoned on his chest and longsword in his hand. He is stoic and strong atop his horse, lethal as a cat.

Yusuf’s eyes meet his, sea against earth. Most of his face is obscured by cloth and metal, but the man knows him, he can see it. The man quirks his brows; Yusuf could almost swear the man was smiling.

The night before, the man had been in his dreams, alongside the strange warrior women with faces and languages from far-off places. He has been told of the nature of war—those who you have taken life from returning to plague your sleep—but this is not a nightmare.

The man’s eyes are gentle and watchful as he speaks to people around a fire. They listen to his words, earnest and somber. Yusuf had been reared with the sounds of tongues he did not understand on his ears and had learned to tell them apart by the roll of their vowels and the sharpness of their consonants. He knows a priest’s Latin when he hears it.

 _A priest._ Yusuf wonders what he makes of this. This was a war of faiths and gods, but he is learning there is no amount of faith that will reassure you when you know what you are should not be.

There were no heralders from above, no purpose or reason that he can see. He was dead, then he was not.

What would they say? His claims of killing the man, they could blow away. A man could survive the fall from a horse. Battles are a fury where the mind is driven only by the swing of the blade and adrenaline rushing through the veins; cloudy memories are common. But what would they make of him if he said, _he slit my throat and yet, I live._ Would he be a miracle, or would he be a pariah?

There lies the nightmares he was forewarned of. _You have broken the laws of the world, Yusuf al-Kaysani,_ they whisper. _No man clear of conscience and soul could have done as you did._

 _I have done nothing,_ he says because it is the truth, and their dark eyes grow cold. It is not for living again that he is cast aside, but for his denial. _I have done nothing._

When he wakes, what he remembers is the eyes on his neck, wary and hostile, the chill on his skin as he sits alone beneath a dark empty sky.

He cannot be certain, so he does not speak of it.

———

Dawn comes again; they fight blade to blade. He is swift and precise with his foreigner’s symmetrical sword, strong lines of coiled muscle; they are equally matched. With its keen edge, he finds all the places where Yusuf’s armour pulls apart. It does not matter. The cuts fade to scars then to nothing at all before the next wound is laid.

Yusuf learns that day there are worse ways to die than a sword through the face and skull, though a spear to the neck is less messy.

The true-white horse, too, is dead that day, Yusuf spots the arrow-struck corpse as he helps a man limp away from the fighting. But he does not need it to find the man anymore. He has begun to mark himself from the others in a way Yusuf knows most will not see. He is playing with his miraculous healing, toying with death, teasing. He takes more than the average soldier can tolerate, puts his enemies down quickly, with more mercy than most men can afford. Yusuf sees it in the man’s fighting, because he has begun to do it too.

The man narrows his eyes and tilts his head when he recognizes Yusuf. _A challenge, or a question?_

A challenge, it seems, as the man hefts his sword and charges at him.

That day, Yusuf had luck on his side, as the man had surprise on their first. He watches the life fade from the man’s eyes as he dies with Yusuf’s dagger still buried in his back.

The following afternoon, the man splinters the back of his skull with an ax. The next, an archer gets Yusuf as he raises his sword to cut the man’s throat. A sword through the gut, a cracked skull, a knife in the thigh. It does not matter. Every time the man falls and Yusuf foolishly thinks, _this is it, he is dead,_ the man does not stay down. Every time Yusuf collapses to the dirt and prays to the god he had gone into this war for, he rises again, with the certainty of the sun.

———

The moon is full. It is the thirty-seventh day of the Siege of Jerusalem. When the sun rises tomorrow, the Holy City will fall to the Crusaders.

They lay in the dirt, caked in mud made of their own blood, Yusuf with a dagger at the man’s throat, the man with his hands desperately clawing at Yusuf’s neck. He is staring into the man’s pale eyes, wide pupil swallowing what little light there is whole, when Yusuf realizes he cannot kill him.

Moving slowly, he lifts himself atop from the man’s chest, letting the dagger fall to the ground. The man’s hands go limp and fall to his sides. He stares at Yusuf with an unwavering focus —not concern or hate or fear, but curiosity. Slowly, as if approaching a startled animal, he removes his helmet and draws his chainmail hood from his head.

Beneath the moonlight, the man’s face was liquid silver, his hair strung from threads of dark silk. Slowly, he allowed his eyes to wander from Yusuf’s gaze to the rest of his face, taking him in, relishing every new detail. Yusuf was a merchant’s son, he had seen beautiful things, but the paintings at the time were not so sophisticated to capture something as enthralling as what he saw before him.

Love was not on his mind that first night, would not be for years, but even that night beneath the full moon and fires of Jerusalem, he knew he would never meet a man like this one.

———

Eventually, Nicky notices he has not stayed in bed; Joe knew he would.

Nicky is purposefully quiet as he moves across the old floorboards, the way he moves in a fight. Booker is just in the other room, asleep for once.

“Yusuf,” Nicky says quietly. This is what he always calls him in the dead of night, when there is no one else to hear.

“Nicolò,” Joe responds.

Words are hovering on his lips, but he does not say what he wants. Instead, Nicky points to the sketchbook. “Is that me?” he asks, in a language old and dead as the sand.

Joe holds the notebook open wider, but Nicky slides down on the floor next to him anyways. Pleased, Joe crushes his nose against Nicky’s cheek, feeling the pull of the muscles in Nicky’s face as he smiles.

Nicky eyes the drawing. “Jerusalem.”

“What do you remember of it?”

Nicky sighs. “The blood. The heat. You.”

The worry still churns in his chest. But he has heard this story before, lived it, and there is comfort in familiar things. “Tell me,” he says.

———

Nicolò paints him a picture in words.

It is not a picture of their Holy War, or of violence, or the glaring sun. It is a painting on a canvas of time, the pigments in the paints memories of him, the tender brush strokes his words.

His skin bronze in the sun, the last bright thing on the horizon at dusk. His dark eyes, shining like polished obsidian as Nicolò lights a campfire to ward away the night chill. The sun-drawn lines on his forehead when something amused him. His warm smile when Nicolò hands him a stolen loaf of warm ration bread from another city fallen to the Crusaders, thanks him and savours it, as poor as it is.

Nicolò goes on.

His rough palms beneath Nicolò’s as he helps him mount his horse. His hand grasping Nicolò’s arm when men clock him as a Crusader and draw their swords. Lethal fingers tender as he pulls tangles from the forelocks of their stolen horses and runs his knuckles down their foreheads.

His patience and eagerness as he untangled Nicolò’s Genoese dialect armed only with a Latin-based trade pidgin he half spoke. The wonder in his eyes as he took in the landscape as it unfolded before them, even as they turned away from all they had ever known. The solemn furrow in his brow as he prayed when there was enough water for them to wash.

He tells Yusuf of how quickly he realized that the room sat still and empty when Yusuf was not in it. How he marked time by the press of Yusuf’s hand against the small of his back or on his wrist, pulling him along. How he had wanted to press his cheek into Yusuf’s hand when Yusuf squeezed the tense muscles of his shoulders and pull Yusuf around him when they slept a night beneath a wide-open sky.

———

“Do you remember the first time I kissed you?” Nicky asks.

Joe does not need to answer.

Nicky speaks.

———

They were in a land neither of them had ever been, with people with unfamiliar faces speaking languages not even Yusuf had heard of, at the edge of a sea with water colder than either of them had felt before. Time and miles separated them from the First Crusade. Nicolò’s native tongue now flows from Yusuf’s lips like wine, Yusuf’s coming to Nicolò with stuttering starts and stops.

Nicolò had taken off his shoes and waded ankle deep into quiet surf, quickly wincing at the bee-sting chill of the water. “Cold,” he complained.

Yusuf threw his head back and laughed. The sound filled Nicky’s chest like a warm drink. His heart began to tap with urgency against his ribs that paused the smile on his lips half-formed, fetal.

“What?” Yusuf asked, grinning.

He was uncertain, had not felt so much wild terror since he first rose from carnage at the Siege of Jerusalem.

He had been dreaming of Yusuf since that night. First, of Yusuf solemnly listening to his commander, then, his undying eyes fixed on him from afar, glittering with taunts and reminders that they are not as they should be.

Those dreams began to turn, the farther they travelled from the world they knew, searching for the women that charged through their dreams at the breaking of dawn. They spent their days together with no one but one another, and still at night Nicolò dreamed of Yusuf.

The laughter than bubble from deep in his chest, smiles bursting forth from the sun, Yusuf bumping their shoulders together to get Nicolò’s attention when he could have just called his name—these were more memory than dream. But the others—his hand on Nicolò’s face, the other trailing up his arm to grasp at his neck and reel him in, in Nicolò’s hair, pulling to steady himself—

He was still as the statues that would someday be fashioned in his image.

Yusuf tilted his head, easy smile still on his lips. “Nicolò?” he said, and Nicolò’s name was sweet honey on his lips.

Nicolò was not quite sure what he was doing when he began; he was acting on instinct alone as he marched up the beach and took his face in his hands and kissed the smile that still lingered on his lips. For a moment, Yusuf was still—not with rejection, Nicolò realized, but with relief.

There was not a whisper of uncertainty on Yusuf’s face as he put his hands on Nicolò’s waist. Yusuf kissed him again, and Nicolò was free as a bird in the wind.

Nicolò had been waiting, but for what? There was nothing in the world worth celebrating more than simply having Yusuf at his side.

———

“That was the dawn of my life,” Nicky says, eyes clear as the sea. “When I knew it was my destiny to find you.”

And Nicky says he is the romantic.

———

The miracle of Joe’s life is not that his wounds close as fast as they open. It is not that he cannot seem to die. Nicky is the miracle, their nine centuries, how warm he is as Joe pulls him close at night, the softness of his skin at the back of his neck when he presses his cheek against it as they sleep. How when he turns to Nicky and tells him in his mother tongue, _you are the only thing I will ever know,_ every time, without question or hesitation, Nicky’s eyes glitter as if Joe has not been telling him this for hundreds of years and he whispers his name like absolution and leans in to kiss him like he has been waiting millennia.

———

Nicky is quiet when he finishes. Joe had pulled Nicky’s hands into his lap as he spoke, his sketchbook cast aside on the floor, and taken the wide silver ring off his pointer finger and slid it on Nicky’s. Idly, he twists it around Nicky’s finger as the silence hangs.

“No matter what happens, I will live on here.” Nicky presses a kiss into his forehead. “And here,” he says. “Here, and here.” The corner of his mouth, the hollow of his throat, his hands raised to Nicky’s lips.

“And me?” Joe asks. _If I am the first to leave._

“In everything,” Nicky says. “In the way I see the world, in my very bones. In all the beautiful things.”

Joe cannot help but smile. “So dramatic,” he says, and Nicky’s laughter is like light.

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me on tumblr @nickyjoe!
> 
> thanks for reading! <3


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